


No chance, no way

by SweetPollyOliver



Series: Queer advocacy group AU [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Bisexual Character, Bisexuality, Canon Character of Color, Canon Gay Character, Emotional Constipation, F/M, LGBTQ Character of Color, M/M, POV Danny, Post Coital Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 09:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetPollyOliver/pseuds/SweetPollyOliver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Jackson didn't say "I love you" and one time he (sort of) did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No chance, no way

**Author's Note:**

> This fic could stand alone, but it makes more sense if you've read the other fics in the series (especially An Ass of You and Me).
> 
> Thank you so much to dirtydirtychai for the beta.

When the door opens and Mrs. Whittemore pokes her head around, Danny looks up and smiles, but Jackson slouches further down where he’s sitting on his bed and doesn’t turn around to greet his mother.  
  
“Everything okay with you boys?” she asks.  
  
After five seconds of increasingly embarrassing silence, Danny replies, “Everything’s fine, Mrs. Whittemore, thank you.”  
  
She smiles again. She’s been checking in on them a lot. Danny thinks she’s just relieved that Jackson’s finally made a friend here in LA. He’d sort of gone on strike when his family had first moved and refused to talk at school for the first two months he’d been there. He’d finally broken his silence one day in the cafeteria, elbowing his way through a small crowd of giggling boys to scornfully inform them that it was just seaweed, god, hadn’t they ever traveled before? His dad had taken him to Japan _twice_.  
  
Danny had dimpled at him and offered to share. Jackson had triumphantly accepted his tribute while the other children dispersed, embarrassed and confused at this turn of events, and Danny had tactfully neglected to inform Jackson about the spam part of spam musubi.  
  
“I need to go out for a little while, but Dad will be home soon, okay? You can hold the fort until then?”  
  
“Mom, pleeeease just go, seriously, I’m fine!” Jackson still won't turn around meet his mother's eye. If Danny was this rude to his mother she'd ground him. If he did it while he had company over, he wouldn't see any allowance until he was forty.  
  
Mrs. Whittemore just leans over and ruffles Jackson’s hair. He twists around to avoid her hand. “Dad should be home no later than seven. Love you, buddy. Nice seeing you again, Danny.”  
  
When she leaves, Jackson looks up at him.  
  
“She’s so annoying. Sorry about that.”  
  
*  
  
Taylor Kennedy is actually taller than both Jackson and Danny, but you’d never know it to look at her because she always seems to be draped around Jackson with her head on his shoulder. He doesn’t pay her a lot of attention, except to turn around for wet, open mouthed kisses every so often.  
  
Danny still isn't really sure how Jackson got a girlfriend that’s so into him when he acts like such an ass. Of course, as the friend through thick and thin _of_ said ass, he probably doesn’t have grounds to judge Taylor for putting up with Jackson’s indifferent behaviour.  
  
He’s kissing her again now, so Danny's just playing a game on his DS and waiting for the smacking sounds to stop, when it’ll presumably be his turn to be the centre of Jackson’s attention again. Or his turn at being the audience for Jackson’s bitch-fest about not making first line on the lacrosse team, anyway.  
  
Mahealani, you really know how to pick ‘em….  
  
“Jackson,” Taylor whispers urgently, as though they were alone instead of in the cafeteria with hundreds of other people — and less than two feet from Danny. “Jackson, I love you.”  
  
Before he has time to roll his eyes, Danny sees Jackson stiffen minutely. He slides Taylor off his lap and she slumps against him again like a cat, all but purring.  
  
“Sure, babe, whatever.” Jackson turns back to Danny. “Anyway-”  
  
“I'm not at a place I can save,” Danny says, but when Jackson stares at him impatiently and kicks his ankle, he sighs and folds his screen down.  
  
  
*  
  
Ian Bradford is not what Danny would have called Jackson’s type — Jackson’s type being popular, pretty, and, up until now, _girls_.  
  
Bradford is skinny and short sighted and writes poetry. _Bad_ poetry, Danny's seen his writing blog.  
  
Jackson is surprisingly tender with him.  
  
Which is fine, Danny’s always wanted him to be nicer to people. It’s just kind of irritating that after a lifetime of failing to appreciate people, Jackson’s decided that this guy, who doesn’t know the difference between the words _allusion_ and _illusion_ and thinks all there is to writing haikus is counting the damn syllables, is some kind of teenage Basho.  
  
He’s never seen Jackson like this though, and it’s mildly unsettling.  
  
Which is why it's all the more surprising when they break up.  
  
“Do you want to talk about it?” Danny asks him, even though talking about Ian is never high on his list of Fun Things To Talk About With Jackson.  
  
Jackson shrugs. “He said he couldn’t write poetry about someone who didn’t love him. Whatever, dude, I didn’t sign up to be anyone’s muse, he just gave really good head.”  
  
Danny diplomatically doesn’t mention the old texts Jackson keeps rereading whenever he thinks no one is looking.    
  
  
*  
  
  
“You know that we love you no matter what, right? You’re our son, Jackson.”  
  
Danny came out to his parents when he was eight. They hadn’t really been surprised, because he’d spent most of the summer the year he turned seven pining after Tom Cruise in Legend. Jackson had been more the “if I ever have a serious relationship with a guy, I might tell them. Or move to a different state” type. Although, obviously, the words “serious relationship” were never uttered.  
  
He wonders if he’d ever have told his parents about them if Mr. Whittemore hadn’t found them making out in Jackson's room. But maybe it wasn't good to dwell too much on these things. If and buts, who needed them?  
  
  
*  
  
  
Beneath him, Jackson gasps and arches back, and the long line of his spine is pressed suddenly against Danny’s chest. He finds a place for one of his hands at Jackson’s hip and smoothes the other down his side.  
  
They stay curled together for several minutes, just touching and breathing together slowly.  
  
“Hey, move.” He nudges Jackson between the shoulderblades with his nose and then kisses him there. Jackson laughs quietly under his breath and the movement presses his back up closer against Danny’s face. He pets him gently and then shoves a little more insistently towards the bed.  
  
After throwing the condom in the vague direction of the trash and a half hearted clean up, they fall down and tangle sleepily, kissing a little for form’s sake, far too tired for anything approaching a round two. Danny expects to be pulled down onto Jackson’s chest, but instead Jackson’s blonde head burrows underneath his arm and settles down against him. He looks down at the top of Jackson’s head and smiles.  
  
Jackson reaches across and pulls Danny’s other arm around him.  
  
“Christ, do I have to do everything myself here?” he says and shoves his leg in between Danny’s. “This is cuddling 101 stuff, I'm embarrassed for you.”  
  
“I’m sorry, little spoon,” Danny says and drops a kiss onto the top of his head.  
  
“Spooning is when you're on your side, idiot.” Jackson huffs the words warmly against Danny’s chest.  
  
“Sorry,” Danny replies and gives him a squeeze. “I’m clearly not the professional you are, you’ll have to forgive me.”  
  
“Go to sleep, Danny.”  
  
“Sure. Love you.” He wants to grab the words out of the air as soon as he says them.  
  
Jackson says nothing. Well, of course. But, then, his grip tightens around Danny for a moment and he presses his lips against his shoulder.  
  
“I said go to sleep.”  
  
*  
  
Jackson isn’t exactly political. He likes guys, he likes girls, but for the most part he likes hot people and it’s pretty obvious he’d joined the LGBTQ group in college for all the guys with six packs rather than any deeply held desires to be an advocate. Still, he’d fit in very well there, all blond hair and cut muscles and pretty, square jawed face. Oh they’d _loved_ him when he joined up at Rush Week. That’s probably why it blindsided him so much when he got the cold shoulder after he started going out with Lydia. The phrase “going back into the closet” has been bandied about by some people who really should fucking know better, but apparently don’t, and Jackson’s taken it hard.  
  
“Fuck them, anyway.”  
  
Being the person who Jackson will actually seek out, to sort-of-but-not-really talk about things that he usually Does Not Talk About, is a continual exercise finding some way of saying what Jackson needs to hear in a way he’s prepared to listen to. And Jackson certainly isn’t going to not-tell anyone else that he’s really fucking hurt by getting frozen out by people he’d assumed were his community. Possibly not even Lydia, who’s talking to _everyone_ about her feelings on the matter.  
  
“Yeah, whatever,” Jackson replies, finally. “Fuck ‘em. I’m not breaking up with Lydia so a bunch of dicks think I’m a ‘real queer.’”  
  
“Lydia’s pretty great,” Danny agrees.  
  
“I just… never expected to feel like… whatever. You know? Again.”  
  
“Again what? I don’t speak Neanderthal.”  
  
“Shut up,” Jackson says, tone artificially light. “It’s just that, when we broke up, I basically thought I’d just be screwing around from then on. Because… fuck, if I couldn't make it work with you then how was I supposed to make it work with someone else? And… it’s stupid, I guess, but I didn’t think you felt that way about someone more than once."  
  
Jackson is staring at the middle distance just over Danny’s shoulder, carefully avoiding eye contact. Maybe it’s a little pathetic that this too little, too late almost-declaration is making Danny’s heart swell, but it is.  
  
“That way?” he asks. His voice isn’t soft and doesn’t waver, because the last thing he wants is to spook Jackson in the middle of this rare demonstration of almost genuine emotion.  
  
“Yeah. That way.” Jackson is looking at the ground now and Danny knows from experience that he has about thirty seconds before this whole thing goes spectacularly south and Jackson’s back to his usual douchebag self.  
  
Danny hooks an arm around Jackson’s neck, pulling him close. “You couldn’t have sweet-talked me like that when we were dating?”  
  
“Shut up,” Jackson says again, more easily this time, and elbows him in the ribs.

**Author's Note:**

> Why are Danny and Jackson in LA, I hear you cry? Well, basically, back when I started this series I had Jackson and Lydia get together when they met in college. It didn't make sense that they wouldn't have met in Beacon Hills if they were both from there, so I transplanted Jackson (and Danny, because they are established as best friends and exes in this 'verse) to LA.


End file.
